Friday, 26 February 2016

Please stand in solidarity with us in protest against Ma Nilar Thein, who has been arrested recently for protest without permission from authorities in Burma. We are calling o immediately and unconditionally release of Ma NilarThein, and all student detainees, farmer activists, worker activits and all political prisoner in Burma.

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Burma has arrested a former monk and leader of a 2007 uprising on grounds of illegally crossing the border, media said on Wednesday, spotlighting the issue of political prisoners that faces Aung San Suu Kyi’s incoming government.

Nyi Nyi Lwin, better known as Gambira, was freed from prison during a 2012 general amnesty, a year after Burma‘s junta handed power to a semi-civilian government, following 49 years of direct rule of the southeast Asian nation.

Since his release, Gambira has divided his time between Burma and neighboring Thailand, but Burmese authorities have re-arrested him several times, in what his family has described as continued harassment for his criticism of the government.

The widely-read Irrawaddy news magazine reported that Gambira was detained again on Tuesday by immigration officers in Mandalay, the country’s second largest city, for illegally crossing over from Thailand.

He was traveling with his wife, Marie Siochana, to obtain a new passport and faces his first hearing on Wednesday, the magazine added.

“I’m worried about him because he can’t get bail,” the magazine quoted Siochana as saying. “He is mentally ill and needs to take medicine regularly. He needs to look after his health, and I wonder why they still want to arrest him.”

Reuters could not immediately reach Siochana or government officials for comment.
In 2007, Gambira emerged as a leading figure in a mass protest over living conditions and the oppressive rule of then-dictator Than Shwe that was dubbed the Saffron Revolution.

The government cracked down harshly in response, opening fire on protesters and sweeping up those who took part.

Gambira’s prison term of 63 years for his role in the protest turned him into one of Burma‘s most prominent political prisoners. Members of his family were also arrested.

While in detention, Gambira was repeatedly beaten and tortured, he and rights groups, such as Amnesty International, have said.

Gambira’s arrest came just two days after a visit by US Assistant Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who urged Burma to free all the rest of its political prisoners.
“Remaining political prisoners must be released and human rights protected for all, no matter what their ethnicity or religion,” Blinken said.

A new parliament dominated by Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy will sit for the first time on 1 February, after the party won the November election.

Rights groups have urged the former political prisoner to prioritize the issue of prisoner releases when the new government is formed.

Sunday, 16 August 2015

6th August 2015The Swan Arr Shin—which means “Masters of Force” in Burmese—had not been seen since the army installed a nominally civiliangovernment in 2011, while the USDA became the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in 2010.But in March, the plain-clothes thugs appeared again. The despised vigilantes reemerged during crackdowns on a student protest and alabor strike in Rangoon, Burma’s biggest city.An investigation by Myanmar Now has uncovered how local authorities have recruited the men from impoverished areas and used themduring the clampdowns....On 5 March, authorities in Rangoon deployed dozens of men in plain clothes to help police carry out a high-profile crackdown on aneducation reform protest in downtown Rangoon. A day earlier, a garment factory protest in the city’s Shwe Pyi Thar Industrial Zonewas also quashed by police and plain-clothes men wearing red armbands with the word “duty”...Soe, an ex-convict who requested not to use his full name for fear of reprisal, was one of them. He remembered how a person at theadministrative office issued catapults and sharp iron spikes about eight inches long to the men, though in photos of the crackdownthe militiamen were only armed with bamboo clubs.“Many people with criminal backgrounds like me had to go if we were sent for by the ward officials. If we don’t obey them they cancause us trouble because of our background,” he said.They were then driven in two buses to Rangoon City Hall where a small student demonstration was underway. It called on thegovernment not to resort to violence in the handling of an ongoing student march from Mandalay to Rangoon....

By ZOYA PHAN | August 3, 2015 Last week the British government arranged for Angelina Jolie to visit Burma, in part in her capacity as co-founder of the PreventingSexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI)...When it launched the PSVI in 2012, the British government faced a real problem with Burma. Reports of sexual violence wereincreasing as a result of the military breaking ceasefires in Kachin and Shan States.

This is exactly the kind of situation that the PSVI was set up to take action on, but while these reports were emerging, the Britishgovernment was embracing the Burmese government and country’s reform process. They were praising President Thein Sein, supportingthe end of international sanctions and shifting their priorities from human rights to trade.

The British attempted to reconcile these contradictory positions by excluding Burma from the PSVI. After pressure from activists andthe British Parliament, the government reluctantly included Burma in the initiative, and had to be further pressed to fund survivorand women’s organizations documenting sexual violence by the military.

Whether these funding commitments actually benefit survivors of military sexual violence is highly debatable. For instance, thegovernment pointed to a legal project in Thai refugee camps to help survivors of sexual violence, but admitted after furtherquestioning that the program was targeted to victims of domestic and other forms of violence, rather than tailored to the uniqueneeds of victims of sexual violence in conflict....If the British government is serious about meeting this aim, it must stop avoiding the fact that most sexual violence in conflict isbeing committed by the Burma Armed Forces. Instead, it refuses to support proposals to establish a UN Inquiry into sexual violencein conflict within Burma. In an attempt to rebuff criticism, they say that UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee has a mandate to reporton sexual violence cases, but the truth is that she has no resources to conduct detailed investigations into these cases, and theBritish government does not provide her funds to do so.

When the British government offered to provide free training to the military—to the tune of $400,000 in funding—they set nopreconditions before providing the training, such as ending the culture of impunity around sexual violence. The British governmentclaimed that the training was about human rights, and then attempted to withhold details of the training from Burma Campaign UK.These details revealed that in the course of a sixty-hour training program, just one hour was dedicated to human rights.

2 Aug 2015The party of Aung San Suu Kyi has rejected bids by 17 members of Myanmar's respected "88 generation" to join its ranks and contestNovember's election, a controversial omission of a group that was expected to galvanise its bid to dominate the ballot....The most high-profile exclusion was the charismatic protest leader Ko Ko Gyi, who spent more than 17 years in and out of prisonbefore his 2012 release. He declined to comment.Pyone Cho was the sole member of the group selected to represent the party in the ballot. The NLD received 3,000 applications andwill field 1,090 candidates.The NLD's candidate list does include several intellectuals and activists, including free speech advocate Nay Phone Latt and SusannaHla Hla Soe, who heads a female empowerment group.

1st Aug 2015A new report, jointly released by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners and Burma Partnership, documents thechallenges faced by human rights defenders across the country. Based on 75 interviews, ‘How to Defend the Defenders?’ is a sadreminder of the climate of fear among those working on human rights and social justice.In Burma, as promises of reform have stagnated, the state apparatus is both directly and indirectly closing the space for defendersto operate safely and without fear of reprisal....Various legislative provisions are broadly applied to unjustly arrest and detain human rights defenders. In recent years, the Rightto Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Processions Law has been widely used as a tool of repression and targeted activists nationwide.While the law typically applies to mass protests, it has also been used to bring criminal charges against lone protesters. MyintKhaing* was arrested last year in Mandalay for making an innocuous call for national unity, and charged under Article 18 of theAssembly Law, a provision that requires prior permission for all acts of ‘assembly.’ He was the sole person present at the site ofthe alleged protest.Both the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights firmly protect the rightto freedom of expression, association and assembly. Both also protect fair trial rights and due process in the judiciary.As one human rights lawyer interviewed in the report noted: “Only 0.01% of cases are free. The whole judicial system is under thecontrol of the Government. The recent events at the Letpadan court indicate that there is no rule of law. Students were summoned atnight instead of during official working hours… .people don’t receive any protection from the laws, and the judges ignore them incourt.”When the judiciary is either directly or indirectly implicated in persecuting human rights defenders for the legitimate exercise offundamental rights, it will never provide those safeguards necessitated by international law.In recent months, the democratization process in Burma has been backsliding. In these last weeks alone, we have borne witness to astate-sponsored campaign to crackdown on the very legitimate exercise of freedom of speech. The government has actively targetedstudent rights defenders in repeated efforts to silence any perceived criticism of the ruling administration. With over 50 studentsremaining in jail today on trumped up and politically motivated charges aimed at stifling any form of dissent, where is thecredibility in this so-called reform process? At what point will the rhetoric of reform begin to coincide with reality on theground?